Jeff Adair: Our obsession with beautiful lawns

Jeff Adair

Friday

Apr 25, 2008 at 12:01 AMApr 25, 2008 at 8:42 AM

About two weeks ago, one of the first warm days of the spring, I spent the morning like many homeowners raking leaves, picking up twigs, and thinking about flowers and other things I'll need to spruce up my yard.

About two weeks ago, one of the first warm days of the spring, I spent the morning like many homeowners raking leaves, picking up twigs, and thinking about flowers and other things I'll need to spruce up my yard.

The backyard is horrible. It's grown worse each year, with more moss than grass. If you need help growing moss, folks, give me a call.

The front, on the other hand, looks OK; it's respectable.

"Oh, this time of year is wonderful," I told myself. "Everyone is equal."

The elderly couple to my right who employ a lawn service; the couple to our left, Al the handyman, who constructed his own deck and installed his own skylights; and the green thumb across the street who has gorgeous shrubs and bushes, are all on the same level.

We're equal -- for now, that is.

Just wait. In a couple weeks, the superstars will separate themselves from the amateurs, the pros from the wannabees.

Can you guess which camp I'll be in? One clue. Last year I bought a fertilizer mix and ended up burning a large patch near the front steps.

Maybe it's a man thing. We gotta be the best. We gotta show off a little. Maybe it's an American thing. Really, I don't know what it is that makes us worship our yards.

Our lawns have to be a crisp, dark green, like a well-manicured golf course. Nothing short of "Better Homes and Gardens" perfection will pass muster.

If we see a single dandelion, crab grass or ground ivy, or if we see signs of grubs, we go bonkers. We buy product after product, fertilizers, lime, the 4-step program, and tons of chemicals to get rid of those pesky weeds.

Those who live in the country probably aren't as obsessed as those of us in the city, suburban dwellers who strive to keep up with the Joneses. We can be in the middle, but there's no way we can have the worst lawn on the block.

We fear the whispers, the disparaging remarks: "Did you see so and so's lawn. I was aghast when I saw those purple things. Yuck! ...They're so low class."

As a nation, the cost for this care is between $35 billion and $40 billion, more than the Gross Domestic Product of the countries of Cyprus, Panama and Luxenbourg using International Monetary Fund 2007 statistics.

The lawns consume around 270 billion gallons of water a week, and we spend more than $2 billion dispensing more than 80 million pounds of pesticides on our lawns and gardens.

I'm no health expert, but from what I've read many of these chemicals are cancer-causing to humans and pets, and the fertilizers, as many environmentalists can attest, are killing our lakes, ponds and other waterways.

"The lawn is a wasteful, polluting, conformist, ridiculously time-consuming and increasingly anachronistic effort to dominate nature -- whatever the cost or consequences," Daniel Wood wrote in a 2006 article for Air Canada's 'enRoute Magazine.

"North Americans spend more on grass than the entire world spends on foreign aid? How is it that during the continents increasingly dry summers, over 60 percent of drinking water goes to quenching the thirst of fundamentally decorative turf? How is it that the typical North American homeowner spends 150 hours on lawn care annually and 35 hours on sex?"

Well? Being a family newspaper, I'm not going to answer that last question.

The time will come when the North American lawn will follow smokers and the SUV culture into the sunset, Wood goes on to write. He notes that Nevada now offers a $1,000 incentive for homeowners to remove their grass, 80 cities in North America have banned the use of lawn pesticides, and class-action suits have overturned civic bylaws on lawn uniformity.

I don't have the time or money -- I'm a proud cheapskate -- to compete with the neighbors, but I'm not willing to take the radical step of getting rid of the lawn all together. Not yet at least.

So, what to do, what to do? Hey, maybe I can get one of those snowmaking machines. Crank it up a couple times a week, and spray the stuff all over my yard.